Senior fractional HR leadership for organizations navigating restructuring, reduction in force, M&A, and leadership complexity. I come in when the stakes are high, the pressure is real, and HR cannot afford to get it wrong.
In the room. Not on the sidelines. Never just observing.
Begin the ConversationI have never believed that rigorous strategy and genuine humanity are in tension. At Obsidian Edge, neither is negotiable.Tola Fadina, Founder and Principal
When a company is mid-RIF, navigating an acquisition, or restructuring under pressure, the gaps become visible fast. Communication breaks down. Leadership misaligns. Documentation lags behind decisions. Employee relations exposure grows quietly in the background.
These things do not fail one at a time. They fail simultaneously. And the cost — legal, cultural, reputational — compounds quickly when there is no senior HR partner in the room who knows what to address first.
That is the problem Obsidian Edge was built to solve.
The risk that grows quietly while leadership is focused on the business. I surface it early and build the documentation and process to contain it.
Executives who agree in the room and fracture in execution. I name what is being avoided and build the structure to move through it.
Employees who find out through rumor. I build the communication architecture before decisions go public.
When HR arrives after the decisions are made, the damage is already in motion. I come in early, stay close, and work upstream of the problems.
Investigations, terminations, performance management, and the documentation that protects your business from the decisions it has to make.
Strategy, sequencing, communication, and the human architecture of a reduction in force done with precision and dignity.
Retention of key talent, cultural due diligence, org design, and the people decisions that determine whether the deal actually works.
When the leadership team is fractured under pressure, I design and facilitate the conversations that create resolution, not just energy.
Not the presenting one. Every Obsidian Edge engagement follows the same diagnostic approach, regardless of the specific challenge. We start with discovery, move to clarity, and build a scoped plan tailored to your actual situation — not a preset menu of services.
An intentional conversation — not a sales call. The goal is to understand the real problem, not the presenting one. Most organizations know something is off. They may not know exactly what, or why, or where it started.
I ask the questions that surface what has been missed — because you are too close, too busy, or too far into a pattern to see it clearly. I have seen these patterns before. I know what to look for.
A scoped project plan shaped around your real situation. Forty-eight hour turnaround on clarifying questions or a proposal. If aligned, we move forward. The engagement shapes itself around what you actually need.
On investment: Pricing is based on scope, timeline, and complexity. Every engagement begins with a discovery conversation where we understand your real situation and build a proposal around that. We will discuss investment at that point. Every engagement moves at the speed of clarity, not the speed of urgency.
Most organizations make decisions reactively — under pressure, without a shared framework, and with incomplete visibility into the human cost of each choice. ROOTED™ is Obsidian Edge's proprietary framework for how organizations build the internal architecture to make better decisions, consistently, at every level.
It is not a program. It is not an initiative. It is the structural discipline of building fairness into the systems, processes, and design of how an organization actually operates — not as an aspiration, but as a permanent feature of how it leads.
In practice, this means talent systems, manager capability, hiring architecture, performance norms, and the decision-making structures that determine how an organization behaves under pressure — not just how it intends to. Organizations that complete ROOTED engagements walk away with decision-making architecture that does not depend on any single leader to sustain it — built into how the business actually runs.
Built from the actual conditions of your organization, not a template applied from the outside.
Embedded into how the business runs day to day, not delivered once and set aside.
Systemic by design. Not dependent on any one leader to sustain it.
The result of decisions made well, consistently, over time.
Built to outlast any single leader, initiative, or season of pressure.
Intentional at every level. Not accidental, reactive, or performative.
Obsidian Edge works at the organizational level. The Season Between works at the human level. Same founder. Same philosophy. Two doors into the same belief: that the work is intentional, the approach is human, and neither is negotiable.
A CHRO reading this site might recognize immediately that her high-performing women need The Season Between. They can access it. Cohorts, licensing, and group rates are available. Inquire for details.
Private advisory for high-performing women navigating the space between who they were and who they are becoming. Not coaching. Not reinvention theater. Careful, strategic work for women whose identities and lives are shifting beneath them — built by someone who has been in those rooms and found her way through.
Through the S.E.A.S.O.N.S.™ Framework, this is where recalibration happens. Not through performance. Through clarity and doing the work.
For organizations: The Season Between is available for corporate cohorts, workbook licensing, and group facilitation. Available to all employees navigating transition or identity recalibration, with particular depth of experience supporting women in leadership.
Inquire about organizational access →Twenty-eight years in HR, beginning with an internship at Cigna Corporation in Philadelphia in 1998 and a full-time career that started at HSBC Bank USA in 2000. Since then: FedEx Express, R/GA, Visa, Meta, JLL — not advising from the outside. Operating from the inside, at scale, when the stakes were real.
I have sat in rooms where difficult organizational decisions were made — decisions that changed people's lives. I led HR for FedEx Express's New York region, managing organizational structure, redeployment, atomization, talent development, leadership development, and employee relations. I led four M&A engagements in a single year. I stayed in those rooms. I built the structure while the chaos was still happening. I protected the business and the people at the same time.
I bring that level of senior judgment into lean environments, so organizations of any size can navigate complexity with the kind of HR partnership that was previously only available inside large enterprises.
What that experience also taught me is this: every significant organizational decision has a human cost that does not appear on the spreadsheet. I have sat with leaders the night before a reduction in force who were carrying the weight of what they were about to do. I have watched talented people leave organizations not because of failure but because the structure could not hold them. I have been the person in the room who said the quiet part out loud — because someone had to, and because getting it right mattered more than getting it comfortable. That particular awareness, of both the business reality and the human cost of every decision, is not something you learn in a program. You learn it by being in the rooms. I have been in the rooms.
Revenue and humanity are not in competition. But you need someone in the room who has held both at the same time.
This work sits alongside The Season Between — a separate private advisory practice for high-performing women navigating identity transition and the space between who they were and who they are becoming. That same belief in rigorous, human-centered work is what built both practices.
Visit The Season Between →Tell me where you are and what you are navigating. I will follow up personally and share a link to book a discovery call — not a sales call. The goal is to understand the real problem, not the presenting one.
I respond to every submission personally.